I'm a staunch supporter of "choice" - at least, in the first trimester.

My guess, however, is that there are few pregnant women out there who, a week or two prior to delivery, wouldn't consider that "entity" inside of them a living baby..... But - not the head of Planned Parenthood!

Via the Corner, be grateful that she’s willing to draw the line at delivery. Some PP officials think a baby’s fair game under certain circumstances even if it’s alive, breathing, and outside the womb.

At least this woman is smart enough to realize her position is shared by only a small percentage of our population. Kudos, however, to interviewer Ramos. Third time's a charm!

Mayor de Blasio brought down the hammer Thursday on three charter schools operated by his nemesis Eva Moskowitz, leaving hundreds of kids without classrooms this fall.

“This has to be the saddest day for the Success Academy’s children, family, teachers, school leaders,” Moskowitz said after meeting with stunned charter parents in Harlem.

“Right now, our kids are being evicted. Evicted out of their school. It’s wrong and we need an explanation. You’re going to have to ask Mayor de Blasio what the motivations are for a decision that will hurt so many children now and, frankly, forever.”

Moskowitz called on Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature to undo the actions. “We need political leadership,” she said.

“We need someone who will put kids ahead of politics. We are a public school. Public schools do not pay rent.”

The Arizona legislature is kind of like the state’s id. It routinely charges into battle without a plan, a map of the enemy territory, or the thought of logistical support. This goes for the right and left wings; thoughtful statesmen are quickly drummed out or drafted to a better gig. Legislators only earn $24K a year, so the role attracts passionate partisans with ample free time.

Although the First Amendment should be enough, legislators wanted to avoid the rare abuses seen in other states in which Christian vendors were punished for choosing not to tacitly condone same-sex marriages. That little nugget was all leftist activists and the media (but I repeat myself) needed to rebrand religious freedom as The Neo-confederate Homophobe Jim Crow H8 Act of 2014.

I agreed with the bill’s modest intentions, but, like many, was concerned about abuses and unintended consequences. With or without a new law, this matter will be fought in the courts and superseded by federal law anyway. Not to mention that Gov. Brewer vetoed it the previous year and was almost guaranteed to veto it again. After the expensive PR mess of SB 1070, the last thing her "Arizona Comeback" needed was another year of headlines decrying us as intolerant rubes.

But the legislature pushed it through anyway. And, despite a famously media-savvy opposition, the lawmakers had no P.R. plan, a negligible online presence and woefully unprepared spokesmen. As most who voted for it hid from the press, the most prominent supporter looked like the cardboard God-bothering hick in every Aaron Sorkin dramedy. Each interview further demonized the bill in the public’s eye.

Predictably, GOP officials across Arizona and the nation fled the unforced error, urging a quick veto. After further damaging the state’s image by dragging out her obvious decision, Gov. Brewer finally nixed the measure last night.

Final score: The Right 0, The Left 1,062.

In a doomed effort on a superfluous bill, Arizona legislators created a political disaster for themselves, short-term damage to the business community, massive fundraising and PR victories for the Left, and a national black eye for social conservatives. Not to mention a lovely media distraction from Obamacare. The only Republican happy about SB 1062 is Chris Christie who could finally give his press office a week’s rest.

Most of my friends were horrified by the Arizona "religious freedom" law that was passed and then vetoed by the governor. They claimed it was "Jim Crow for gays" and made some good arguments about what was so wrong with such a law.

Even though I’m for marriage equality – next week I’ll be filing a brief supporting the challenge to the marriage laws of Oklahoma and Utah in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit – I have no problem with Arizona’s SB 1062.

The prototypical scenario that SB 1062 is meant to prevent is the case of the New Mexico wedding photographer who was fined for declining to work a same-sex commitment ceremony. This photographer doesn’t refuse to provide services to gay clients, but felt that she couldn’t participate in the celebration of a gay wedding. There’s also the Oregon bakery that closed rather than having to provide wedding cakes for same-sex ceremonies. Why should these people be forced to engage in activity that violates their religious beliefs?

For that matter, gay photographers and bakers shouldn’t be forced to work religious celebrations, Jews shouldn’t be forced to work Nazi rallies, and environmentalists shouldn’t be forced to work job fairs in logging communities. This isn’t the Jim Crow South; there are plenty of wedding photographers – over 100 in Albuquerque – and bakeries who would be willing to do business regardless of sexual orientation, and no state is enforcing segregation laws. I bet plenty of Arizona businesses would and do see more customers if they advertised that they welcomed the LGBT community.

At the end of the day, that’s what this is about: tolerance and respect for other people’s beliefs. While governments have the duty to treat everyone equally under the law, private individuals should be able to make their own decisions on whom to do business with and how – on religious or any other grounds. Those who disagree can take their custom elsewhere and encourage others to do the same.

I have very conflicting emotions regarding these issues. As someone who strongly defends the rights of my gay friends and relatives, I in no way want to compromise their freedoms and freedom of association. Nevertheless, as Shapiro states - should we force Jews to work at a Nazi function? Would it be right to say a black person was breaking the law if they refused to photograph a party celebrating the Confederacy?

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the "Flat Earth Society" for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts."

But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today's scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

"Consensus" science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

So what would the ideal alternative to Obamacare look like? It should provide cost-effective care and the quality treatment that Americans deserve. Effective reform should discourage over-insurance that results from the subsidy of so-called Cadillac plans that pay for basic, inexpensive and predictable proceduresand have patient co-payments that are too low. Reform should encourage consumers to use America’s scarce health resources efficiently by inducing them to get tests and treatments that are justified instead of those that are selected because they are almost free to the decision-makers. Finally, reform should make health insurance available to the vast majority of Americans, some of whom cannot afford insurance without help.

[T]here’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. …

An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.

What the Times wrote in 1987 is equally true today: “Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.” This is like a law of physics–but one which, the Times tells us, has now been “discredited.” Sure: just like the proposition that water flows downhill has been discredited. Left-wing economists carried out a couple of flawed studies that purported not to find an increase in unemployment under the conditions studied, and liberals have seized on them to claim that with regard to labor, the law of supply and demand has been repealed.

Nonsense. What has changed since 1987 is not the economic literature, but American liberals’ progressive detachment from reality. Nowhere can we see this decline more clearly than in the New York Times editorial board.

If you fancy yourself a person who values science, rational discourse, and data-driven truths, one assumes you also value skepticism and dissent — and it’s almost certain that you wouldn’t advocate that some debates be off limits. Well, one person with no compunction about shutting down dissent is John Kerry, whose recent comments about climate change to an audience at a U.S. embassy-run American Center in Indonesia were a lot more loathsome than people might gather.

“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts…”

This is the formula: scientific consensus cannot be challenged. The solutions and policies we offer are as irrefutable as science and, consequently, also unchallengeable. So only “deniers” weigh the economic trade-offs of environmental policy, or the wisdom of dumping billions of dollars and untold resources into cronyism and questionable technologies, or challenge the highly dubious contention that left-wing environmental policies, even if successful, would alter the trajectory of the supposed climate catastrophe.

President Barack Obama traveled to California Friday to highlight the state’s drought emergency at two events near Fresno, calling for shared sacrifice to help manage the state’s worst water-shortage in decades. He then spent the rest of the weekend enjoying the hospitality of some of the state’s top water hogs: desert golf courses.

Your political leanings, or pretty much anything else about you - you should read all of this and take it to heart. And you should hope to hell that something is done about it. The tragedy that our justice and penal system has become harms all of us.

The recent commutation by President Obama of eight lengthy individual sentences for drug abuse is a tiny but significant gesture, as America’s long indulgence, spiked intermittently into passionate support, for draconian hypocrisy in its failed War on Drugs yields grudgingly to the forces of reason and decency. This follows the reduction in the disparity of sentences for crack as opposed to powder cocaine from 100 to one to 18 to one. There are a number of reasons for this change, but the principal one, apart from the absurd starting imbalance, is that the cocaine-using middle-class and university white people are powder customers, and the generally poorer African Americans tend to be crack users. The first black president and attorney general in U.S. history were not impetuous in their haste to make this change, and 18 to one is still an unsupportable discrimination.

Various states, with the encouragement of a handful of more creative public-policy thinkers, such as Newt Gingrich (who despite his temperamental unsuitability for high public office is an original mind at times), have released significant numbers of nonviolent offenders because of budgetary restraints and the hideous expense of the custodial system. There is a state-supreme-court mandate in California to reduce prison overcrowding, which has reached proportions of deemed unconstitutional inhumanity. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to discern much sense of traditional aspiration for reform, of the kind that fired the minds and ambitions of great statesmen of the past, not just ostensible radicals like William Jennings Bryan or even Eugene V. Debs, and the British Shaftesbury, Bright, and Cobden, but such great and sometimes apparently conservative officeholders as the Roosevelts, Wilson, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George, and Churchill. They were all motivated by companion desires to preserve and strengthen the societies in which they lived, but to make them better and fairer. Little of this spirit remains in most countries, and practically none in the United States, where all politics is money: Members of the Congress represent the leading pecuniary interests in their states or districts and presidential candidates raise a billion dollars each so that mighty computer programs and advertising blitzes can fight each other for the heart and mind of an ever more disappointed, cynical, and under-served electorate.

Jim Webb, a thoughtful former Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, lamented that the U.S. has six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as its nearest comparable, prosperous democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), and that it has 48 million designated felons. Even if the large number of those who are lumbered with distant and unstigmatizing offenses, such as disorderly conduct or a failed breathalyzer many years ago (though the American reciprocal-enforcement system is apt to keep them out of cooperating foreign countries, such as Canada), are subtracted, that still leaves about 20 percent of adult American males as felons. This is preposterous. Senator Webb said there were three possible explanations for this: Those other countries are less concerned with crime, which is bunk; or Americans are uniquely tempted by and addicted to crime, which is also bunk; or there is something fundamentally amiss in the U.S. criminal-justice system (bingo). Webb promised, in 2009, a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry and recommendation, but he did not seek reelection to the Senate, and after the usual flutter of attention, the whole idea just vanished into the ether.

We all already assumed that, I know. No matter how desperately The One may want to save face by refusing to fire Sebelius, there’s no way he would have kept her on if she had ruthlessly hidden the site’s problems from him until it went live and embarrassed him in front of the world. Of course he knew. And really, what incentive did Sebelius have to hide the truth? Even if she thought very early on that HHS could pull it together at the last minute and get the site ready by October 1, it must have been apparent soon enough that that was impossible. At that point, she had nothing to lose by telling O and everything to gain — i.e. keeping her job — by being honest.

While Sebelius has said the president was not aware of HealthCare.gov’s problems, more than 750 pages of documents obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request show she made scores of visits to the White House.

The documents reveal that Sebelius met with or attended calls and events with Obama at least 18 times between Oct. 27, 2012, and Oct. 6, 2013, including at least seven instances in which the two were scheduled to discuss the new healthcare law, according to the secretary’s draft schedules.

She had breakfast or lunch with Pete Rouse, considered one of Obama’s closest advisers, at least three times. Moreover, Sebelius had scheduled calls or meetings with Valerie Jarrett, an Obama confidante, and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough…

The schedules suggest Sebelius was an active White House presence in the months leading up to the botched rollout, and raise new questions about why Obama wouldn’t have known about the problems that were exposed on Oct. 1.

In 2004 leftwing filmmaker Michael Moore released his film Fahrenheit 9/11, a searing attack on the legitimacy of George Bush’s election to the presidency in 2000, and his handling of events before, during, and after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2011 on the World Trade Center. Moore was unequivocal in his stated hope that the movie would “help unseat a president.”

Fahrenheit 9/11 was produced by Moore’s production company Dog Eat Dog Films, a corporation. At the time – before the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—it was illegal for corporations to spend money “in connection with any election to any political office,” and illegal for an officer of a corporation to consent to such an expenditure.

Imagine if fourteen months after the election, Moore had been indicted by a Bush-appointed federal prosecutor for violating the prohibition on corporate spending. Imagine if Moore was arrested, cuffed, criminally charged for his activities, had his passport confiscated, and bail set at $500,000–what would have been the reaction from the America’s liberals? Of the press? Of Senator Barack Obama?

Something much like this is, in fact, going on now, with nary a peep from the mainsteam press or the American left, and definitely not a peep from the President. Last month, Dinesh D’Souza, a long-time conservative commentator and director of the 2012 documentary film 2016: Obama’s America, was arrested, cuffed, and had his passport confiscated before being released on $500,000 bail. His alleged crime? Reimbursing four other individuals for making $5000 campaign contributions to the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of his college friend, Wendy Long.

One Illinois Republican lawmaker has asked the White House and the Obama’s to stop being “hypocrites” and practice what they preach about nutrition.

Tuesday night’s glutton-fest of a White House state dinner for French President François Hollande was the perfect example of why U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis has introduced legislation that would require official White House meals to follow the same USDA mandated guidelines for school lunch and breakfast programs.

Davis’ bill, H.R. 3686, the School Nutrition Fairness Act, is “to make sure this Administration is aware of the real-life impact their regulations are having on kids who are going hungry and our smaller school districts who are struggling to keep up with the increased costs,” he wrote on FacebookTuesday.

The Washington Times reported that the meal served to guests at Tuesday’s dinner ran an estimated 2,500 calories, “which is almost three times as much as what the first lady and the USDA allow our school kids to eat in the school lunch program,” Davis said. It’s “the height of hypocrisy.”

The dinner’s high-calorie menu shattered the USDA standards of approximately 1,200 total calories per day for students that the first lady touted as part of her anti-obesity campaign.

[A] main course of dry-aged ribeye beef served with blue cheese, 12 varieties of potatoes and quail eggs.

The first course was American Osetra caviar, farmed from sturgeon in estuaries in Illinois, followed by a “winter garden salad.”

Dessert was a selection of sweets: a chocolate malted cake that combined bittersweet chocolate from Hawaii and tangerines from Florida, served with vanilla ice cream made in Pennsylvania. Also on the menu were fudge made from Vermont maple syrup, lavender shortbread cookies and cotton candy dusted with orange zest.

I could rage on and on about Monday’s gobsmacking announcement that the Obama administration is once again unilaterally delaying a key aspect of its health-care law and what this act of astonishing royalism suggests about the president and his fundamental disrespect for the American system of checks and balances.

Remember: The law passed in March 2010. It was to go into full effect on Jan. 1, 2014. That means the administration had almost four years to get its ducks into a row. Four years. That was more time than it took us to win World War II, which we fought across three continents, a bunch of islands and two oceans.

And yet here we are, four years later, and the administration has spent the past six months effectively rewriting the law for both political and practical reasons.

It shouldn’t be able to do this, because it is, you know, a law. The president doesn’t write laws. Congress does. He signs them and it’s his job to implement them. If he can’t write laws, he can’t rewrite them either.

But he is, and without resistance.

The simple fact of the matter is, it couldn’t get things to work because ObamaCare is unworkable. It’s a jury-rigged mess that needs about 300 moving gears to mesh perfectly for it to function at all. It’s pretty clear that it never will.

Ever since Obamacare’s implementation has gone off the rails, the White House has been trying to fix the law by deciding not to enforce, or to selectively enforce, or to enforce differently, various provisions of the law. The problem with that is…that it’s not how American government is supposed to work.

As any civics class teacher knows, the way American government is supposed to work according to the U.S. Constitution is that Congress makes laws, and then the executive branch executes them (that’s why it’s called the executive branch). It can’t decide what provisions it wants to enforce or not. The reason for that is pretty obvious: if the executive branch can decide willy-nilly to enforce or not enforce whatever legislative provisions it wants, it is, in effect–and in reality–enacting its own legislation. But nevermind that worrisome unconstitutionality.

What’s striking here is that liberals have gone along with these moves from the White House.

And it makes intuitive sense: they have so much invested in Obamacare’s success that, just like the Administration, they’re pretty much willing to do anything to get the law to work, no matter how far-fetched or, well, illegal.

The problem with this is that, of course, if it becomes accepted American Constitutional tradition that the President can apply whatever laws she wants, well, that tradition applies to Republicans as well as Democrats. Now that the Obama Administration has set a precedent that the White House can decide not to apply parts of Obamacare, it has given the authority to the next Republican administration to rewrite the health law at will, without even having to go to Congress. But, apparently, this doesn’t make liberals blanch.

Of course, the next Republican administration might want to use this new presidential superpower to rewrite all sorts of laws. Entitlement laws. Labor laws. Environmental laws. Abortion laws. Financial regulations. Civil liberties. The list goes on.

For decades, conservatives have been dreaming of enough power to reshape an American government that, despite the Reagan revolution, still remains fundamentally liberal in its structure. The Obama Administration may be handing it to them. With a liberal cheering section.

Race relations are vastly better in 2014 than the '50's and '60's when I was a child. But from the constant talk and discussion of race in today's world - you'd never guess that this is so. Clarence Thomas explains.

Speaking at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Fla., Thomas, the second black justice to serve on the court, lamented what he considers a society that is more “conscious” of racial differences than it was when he grew up in segregated Georgia in the days before — and during — the civil rights era.

“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up,” Thomas said during a chapel service hosted by the nondenominational Christian university. “Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.

“That’s a part of the deal,” he added.

Thomas spent his childhood in a place and time in which businesses and government services were legally segregated. In his 2007 memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," he described his experience growing up as an African-American Catholic in Georgia during the Jim Crow era. “I was a two-fer for the Klan,” he said.

Throughout his career, Thomas said, he has experienced more instances of discrimination and poor treatment in the North than the South.

“The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated,” Thomas said. “The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.”

New Richmond, Wis., is getting a new brewery and, according to the brewer, it has Minnesota's laws to thank for it.

John Moore, owner of Barley John's Brew Pub in New Brighton, said he's wanted for years to get his beer into retail stores. But brewpubs in Minnesota are limited by law to on-site sales, and brewpub owners are restricted from opening up breweries that produce craft beer for store shelves.

"I think we make really, really good beer here, but few people have an opportunity to get at it because of the limitations in the state's requirements," Moore said.

So he's heading across the border.

This spring, Moore plans to break ground on a 10,000-barrel brewery in New Richmond, with hopes of selling the beer starting in the fall.

While he would rather the brewery be in Minnesota, building it in Wisconsin makes sense as the next step in expanding his business, Moore said. His brewpub has been making beer for 14 years and has won awards, yet he still runs into craft beer aficionados who have never heard of Barley John's -- because it's not on tap in bars or found in liquor and beer stores, he said.

In a sane world, Israeli company SodaStream would be a poster child for corporate responsibility. Of the 1,300 staff in its West Bank plant, 450 are Israeli Arabs and 500 are Palestinians. All workers receive equal pay, which in the case of the Palestinians is several times the average salary they would normally make.

Here is a real-life example of coexistence, a place where Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, Druze and Christians work together in peace. To boot, they assemble a product that, by turning tap water into fizzy drinks, cuts the production of environmentally damaging beverage containers.

Alas, this world is not sane, certainly not when it comes to discussions of Israel. Simply because one of its 20-plus factories is in the West Bank, anti-Israeli activists have been targeting SodaStream and its celebrity spokesperson, American actress Scarlett Johansson.

No matter that the factory is in a location that would most likely remain Israeli in a future peace agreement. And if it became part of Palestine, even better for the new state's tax revenues. But in the destructive world of supposedly pro-Palestinian activism, this facility must be boycotted, those 500 Palestinians and their families be damned.

It is quite a spectacle to see European companies suggest that it's unethical to do business with Israelis, while so many of their colleagues are flocking for new deals in Iran, the land of public stoning of adulterers and hanging of gays—but I digress.

Is Israel a perfect nation that never does any wrong? Of course not. But until these Israel haters start treating other nations around the world with a scintilla of the strict standards they do for Israel - I will continue to write them off as haters - and anti-Semites. Yes; that is what they are.